Kenneth Gibson is a media scholar and freelance journalist living in Montreal. His primary scholarly interests are the history of the print industry and journalism’s metamorphosis in the wake of the digital transition. He is currently completing a master’s degree at Concordia University.
April 24, 2018
As the movable type printing press spread across Western Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century, it’s estimated that Europeans printed around twelve million books. By the eighteenth century, they printed one billion. Such exponential growth began a period, roughly from 1700–1900, during which European culture could “most fully” be described as a print culture, according to the authors of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation.